42 break, and sometimes-rarely, briefly- they actually seemed to do so. But I had a rueful faith in the basic good judgment of the herd. Crowds col- lected where the waves were best. This attitude drove Mark nuts. And Ocean Beach, with its great uncrowded winter waves, did in fact bend the universal Malthusian surf equation. Freezing water and abject fear and ungodly punishment were helpful that way. A block or so before we reached Santiago, I took off, over Mark's ob- jections, on a midsized wave, a detour that I quickly regretted: the set behind my wave gave me a thorough drub- bing, almost driving me over the inside bar. By the time I got back outside, the sun was setting, I was shivering, and Mark was a hundred yards farther north. I decided not to follow him. I would see him later; there was going to be a slide show at his apartment that evening. Now shivering badly, I started looking for a last wave. But the peaks along here were shifty, and I kept misjudging their speed and steepness. I nearly got sucked over backward by a vicious, ledging wave, then had to scramble to avoid a monstrous set. The twilight deepened. The spray lifting off the wave tops still had a crimson sunset tinge, but the waves themselves were now just big, feature- less blue-black walls. They were get- ting more and more difficult to judge. There were no longer any other surf- ers in sight. I was ready to try to paddle in-an ignominious maneuver. And, when a lull came, that's what I did, digging hard, struggling to keep my board pointed shoreward through the crosscurrents of the outside bar, using a campfire on the beach as a visual fix, and glancing back over my shoulder every five or six strokes. I was about halfway to shore, com- ing up on the inside bar, when a set appeared outside. I was safely in deep water, and there was no sense trying to cross the inside bar during a set, so I turned and sat up to wait. Against the still bright sky, at the top of a massive wave off to the south and far, far outside, a lithe silhouette leaped to its feet, then plunged into darkness. I strained to see what happened next, but the wave disappeared behind oth- ers, nearer by. My stomach had done a flutter kick at the sight of someone dropping into such a wave at dusk, and UNDERTAKINGS Though "a spindle shanked withered virgin" (my source is Virginia Woolf), Rose Macaulay was right about ruins, perhaps it takes one to know. . . She said it best in her obvious phrase: the pleasure of ruins. Weare not aggrieved by the wreckage of Selinus; we inspect the unrestored stanchions of Sayil without despair, without dread: these places reward our intrusion by a sense of victory, partly ours for Being There with them, partly theirs for surviving to greet us. Anything real can give human beings pleasure; pain inheres only in what has not come to pass, the unmade event, as when we read, in Baudelaire's list of petits poe'mes en prose projected and not written: "Captive in a Lighthouse," "Festival in a Deserted City." . . . Suffer these ruins of what never was. -RICHARD HOWARD . as I bobbed over the swells gathering themselves for the assault on the inside bar I kept peering toward where he had vanished, watching for a riderless board washing in. That wave had looked like a leash-breaker. Finally, less than forty yards away, a dim figure appeared, speeding across a ragged inside wall. Whoever it was had not only made the drop but was still on his feet, and flying. As the wave hit deep water, he leaned into a huge, elegant carving cutback. The cutback told me who it was. Bill Bergerson, known around Ocean Beach as Peewee, was the only local surfer who could turn like that. He made one more turn, driving to within a few yards of me, and pulled out. His expression, I saw, was bland. He nodded at me but said nothing. I felt tongue-tied. I was re- lieved, though, by the thought of hav- . ing company for the passage across the inside bar, which was now detonating continuously. But Peewee had other plans. He turned and, without a word, started paddling back out to sea. S URFING is not a spectator sport. There is an international contest circuit, and a handful of surfers earn a living from competition, but most of the professionals actually make ends meet by endorsing products-surfboards, wetsu its , or the output of one of the many companies in the surf-apparel industry. Contest surfing is seldom exciting to watch: the ocean cannot be relied on to provide memorable waves on an organizer's schedule, and few of the world's great surf spots happen to be natural amphitheatres. One of the few times I've seen non- surfers get their money's worth was on a minor Indonesian island about a hundred miles west of Sumatra, in 1979. Half a dozen of us, Australians and Americans, had found our way to a fishing village on the south west shore of the island. Photographs of the wave that breaks near the village would later be splashed across the surf magazines,